Manchu Detailed Description

Manchu

The 4,300,000 people that the government of China identifies as
Manchu should more properly be called the Chinese of Manchu ancestry.
Numerous though they may be, the members of this particular minority
group are now so thoroughly Sinicized there is virtually nothing to show
that they are Manchu. They work in the same professions, live the same
lives, and enjoy the same pleasures that the Han do. Nor is there any
geographical area where only Manchus live. There is no Manchu region,
prefecture, or even county anywhere in Manchuria. In every place where
Manchus are found, they live among other groups, especially the Han.
Though the Manchus are officially recognized as a minority, they have in
fact been Chinese for a long time.

The Manchu language is all but extinct. The only people who speak it
on a day-to-day basis are the Xibo minority of Xinjiang, who were dis-
cussed in the preceding section. The rest of the Manchus use Chinese as
their first language, and most of those among them who still know the

MINORI TIES OF NORTH CHINA 217

old language reportedly speak it with a pronounced Chinese accent. The
state of spoken Manchu in Manchuria may be compared to that of Gaelic
in the British Isles, an idiom that is also nearing extinction.

Manchu is an important language in East Asia in spite of its present
moribund state. For the more than two hundred and fifty years (1644-
1911) that the Manchus were in power in China, it was an official lan-
guage of the Qing dynasty. By the eighteenth century it probably ceased
completely to be spoken in the court, even by the Manchus themselves,
but all official documents continued to be written bilingually, in Manchu
and in Chinese, up until the very end of the dynasty. Even in the first
decade of the twentieth century, the great Manchu notices in black print
on light yellow paper could still be seen hanging next to the doors of the
Yamen.

There is also an extensive translation literature in Manchu. Because it
had pledged itself to a state-supported Confucianism, the Qing govern-
ment had to make the relevant Chinese materials available for the edifica-
tion and instruction of all its people, and the classical and canonical books
were translated on a scale seldom seen before. After the classics and his-
tories came the literature of diversion, beginning with the translation of
the famous Chinese novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in 1650.
The ninety-four fascicles of the literary anthology Guwen Yuanjian were
published in 1685, and the historical compilation Zizhi tongjian gangmu
began to appear in its 111 translated fascicles in the year 1691. Bilingual
editions of all literary genres became available during the Qianlong
period (1736-1796), and the care with which these translations were
made is seen, for example, in the excellent Manchu edition of The
Golden Lotus.

In the West, information about China first became available in Man-
chu, which was the language China used for official diplomatic commerce
with Russia from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. European
Sinologists studied Manchu extensively in the eighteenth century and
used it for their interpretations and translation of Chinese, a language
that was then considerably less well known to them than Manchu. Today
Manchu is principally useful — apart from linguistic purposes — as histor-
ical source material for the Qing period, especially in places where
phonetic transcriptions of place and personal names are needed, and for
documents on various minority affairs, which were sometimes composed
only in Manchu.

Amost all that is known about the Manchu language comes from this official
literature. Direct information from the southern dialect upon which it was based

S. ROBERT RAMSEY

The Languages of
China

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

PRESS
Copyright © 1987 by Princeton University Press